Internet faces crisis

The internet will face a space crisis in two and a half years unless every single person using it switches over to a new version of IP address, claimed Geoff Huston, chief scientist at APNIC, part of the Number Resource Organisation which is responsible for managing internet addresses.

He said that unless much greater investment in the infrastructure for the updated ‘IPv6’ is made soon, there will not be any more of the current ‘IPv4’ addresses to give out – meaning that no new users can connect to the internet at all, stopping growth entirely and stunting new technologies such as WiMax.

"By 9 Jan 2011, the underlying machinery of the internet that generates [IP addresses] will run out,” said Huston. “We only had four billion, and in the past 10 years we have gone through almost all of them.”

Of future users he said: “They all need addressees and we cant give them addresses."

However he added that not enough has been done structurally to facilitate the crossover to IPv6, which will make the process difficult.

"If you deploy IPv6, [your machines] can't talk to the rest of the world, This means the entire Internet has to run two protocols for the next 10 years."